Program in Latino Studies Bloghttps://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies
Princeton UniversityThu, 12 Feb 2015 16:21:49 +0000en-UShourly139377408LATINO AMERICANS SERIEShttps://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/09/09/latino-americans-series-coming-soon/
https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/09/09/latino-americans-series-coming-soon/#respondMon, 09 Sep 2013 15:05:38 +0000http://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/?p=189Continue reading →]]>LATINO AMERICANS is a three-part series that chronicles the lives and experiences of Latinos in the United States from 1800 to the 21st Century. Through its people, politics and culture, LATINO AMERICANS tells the story of early settlement, conquest and immigration; of tradition and reinvention; of anguish and celebration; and of the gradual construction of a new American identity from diverse sources that connects and empowers millions of people today. The series utilizes historical accounts and personal experiences to vividly tell the history, featuring interviews with close to 100 Latinos from the worlds of politics, business and pop culture, as well as lesser-known Latinos who lived through key chapters in American history.

LATINO AMERICANS premiered on September 17, September 24 and October 1 from 8:00 – 10:00pm ET nationally on PBS. The bilingual project includes a companion book by Ray Suarez, Senior Correspondent for PBS NEWSHOUR.

]]>https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/09/09/latino-americans-series-coming-soon/feed/01892013 Latino Graduationhttps://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/06/25/2013-latino-graduation/
https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/06/25/2013-latino-graduation/#respondTue, 25 Jun 2013 19:34:36 +0000http://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/?p=182Continue reading →]]>The 2013 Latino Graduation Ceremony took place on Sunday, June 2 at the Carl A. Fields Center. After remarks made by Joe Ramirez ’07, professor Miguel Centeno gave the Keynote Address. Ballet Folklórico de Princeton also gave a special performance.

30 students participated in the graduation ceremony, including the 2013 LAO concentrators Leticia Garcia-Romo and Daria Dmitrievna Kolotiy. View pictures from the ceremony.

The event was co-sponsored by LAO, the Program in Latin American Studies, Carl A. Fields Center, Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Program in African American Studies, Program in Teacher Preparation, Program in Urban Studies, Program in Neuroscience, Program in American Studies, Department of Religion, Department of Chemistry, Program in Environmental Studies,

The words spewed from the mouth of a pale, freckle-faced boy, taunting me on our elementary school playground.

I wish I could recall what I said to inspire the insult. But more than three decades later, I remember only my reply. “Stupid Peruvian,” I pointed out, wagging my finger.

My family had emigrated from Lima to Northern California a few years earlier, so my nationality was a point of fact (whereas my stupidity remains a matter of opinion). The response so confused my classmate that my first encounter with prejudice ended as quickly as it started. Recess resumed.

Today, my grade-school preoccupation with nationality feels a bit quaint. Peruvian or Mexican — does it even matter? We’re all Latinos now.

I am honored to participate in this discussion which brings together top scholars in the field of immigration and Princeton alumni whose work and influence can be decisive both in terms of the instruction we provide to graduate and undergraduate students and with respect to the field of policy. Princeton faculty and alumni have been, and can continue to be, a force for constructive change in the rationalization of our immigration system and in the provision of health care to vulnerable populations, including immigrants.

Immigration to America during the last half century has transformed the demographic profile and politics of the nation. By 2008,

the foreign-born had surpassed 40 million or approximately 1-in-7 of all those in the country. Immigrants and their children numbered 70 million or almost 1-in-4 persons. Newly-minted ethnic groups—Hispanics and Asian-Americans—that did not exist officially fifty years ago now represent the fastest growing component of the U.S. population. Forty million Hispanics alone have become the nation’s largest ethnic minority.

In this presentation, I address three main areas. First, I discuss the general circumstances surrounding two broken national systems: immigration policy and health-care provision, noting that neither of the two can be fixed without correcting the limitations of the other. In the second part of my presentation, I focus on a study carried out by the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund, a grassroots organization founded in 2004 by local activists in Princeton, about the health related needs of Latinos in this part of the world. In addition to the study in question, LALDEF has organized six health-care fairs and other interventions which have included the participation of physicians, nurses, and advocates in the community at large but also Princeton University students working in partnership with LALDEF and involved in Community Based Learning Initiatives. Finally, I offer some recommendations derived from research we have conducted on the subjects of immigration and health.

Immigration and Health Care: Two Broken Systems in Need of Reform

Four years ago, in May 2009 (as part of the roster of activities of the Princeton Center for Migration and Development) I organized a conference entitled WHAT IS AILING U.S.? HEALTH CARE AND IMMIGRATION—ACCESS AND BARRIERS which brought together top medical administrators, physicians, nurses, community activists and academics in a conversation about health care provision to underserved populations, including immigrants. The conference was a culmination of a two-year long research project sponsored by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation that focused on more than sixty medical institutions located in South Florida, Central New Jersey, and Southern California, and the way in which they addressed the needs of a large population formed by impoverished people, most of them lacking English fluency and proper immigration status. The main findings of that study are contained in a special issue of the journal Ethnic and Racial Studies and in a book published last year by Routledge.

The 2009 Conference took place at a time of great despair. Efforts at immigration reform had failed in 2007 and 2009, and would fail again in 2010. In particular, the DREAM Act, a bill introduced before the U.S. Congress in 2001 to provide relief for children brought to the United States by undocumented parents, had repeatedly been rejected in a climate of mounting hostility and xenophobia that followed the brutal attacks on Washington and New York in September, 2001. Although fear of Islamist terrorists fueled the creation of the eerily named Department of Homeland Security, it was humble Guatemalans and Mexicans who became the target of raids and deportations even as opportunistic members of the Commentariat agitated against “interlopers,” “law-breakers,” and “burdens on the society.”

Under those circumstances it was hard to remember or make others remember that unauthorized immigration was not just the result of people from Mexico or Central America violating civil statutes, but the consequence of an outdated, ineffective, and cruel immigration policy entirely out of correspondence with the needs of the American economy. To give but one example: while the American labor market generates demand for hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers, roughly ten thousand visas were being awarded to low-skilled workers from Mexico, a country with which the United States has historical connections both political and economic. Such discrepancies between market supply and demand, on the one side, and immigration law on the other side made it virtually certain that many immigrants, eager to fulfill the American Dream, would fall outside of the law contributing to the expansion of the undocumented population in the United States. In fact, as Douglass Massey has shown through his remarkable studies, the harshness of immigration policies after 2001, contributed to the burgeoning of the undocumented population by increasing the costs of circular migration and leading more people to stay in the U.S. rather than face the risks of repeated border crossing.

The Great Depression of 2008 reduced illegal immigration reminding us that a healthy economy generates demand for foreign-born workers while economic malaise does not. The paradoxical conclusion for xenophobes and Nativists is this: the solution to immigration is simple—let the economy sink and no one will want to come. By 2011, the undocumented population originally assessed at 12 million had reduced by a million, still a sizable contingent commensurate to the total population of many nations: a nation within a nation, a nation in the shadows, performing some of the least desirable jobs without protections, without rights, without hope of membership in the larger society. That population includes between two and three million young people brought into the United States at an early age—individuals who did not break any laws, who are as American as you or me but who are as deportable as those just arrived without papers.

Then, a beautiful thing happened—a thing that some of us, indeed those of us in this panel, had been anticipating for some time but a thing that arrived sooner than expected as part of the 2012 presidential election: the rising power of the Latino vote. Overnight, pundits like Shawn Hannitty and Lou Dobbs—individuals who had been instrumental in the demonization of immigrants—experienced a miraculous conversion, now supporting immigration reform, including a path towards regularization and citizenship for the eleven million undocumented residents of our country.

This is a critical development not just because it offers the promise of justice and redress to a large number of people who have suffered unnecessarily for a long period of time but also because immigration reform is a critical precondition for the rationalization of health-care provision in the U.S.

A signal achievement of the Obama Administration was the passage in 2010 of the Affordable Care Act, a notoriously restrained and conservative piece of legislation that is, nonetheless, a welcome step in the direction of universal health care provision. For political reasons having more to do with the climate of hostility against immigrants than any sensible forethought on the matter, Obamacare excludes undocumented immigrants. In other words, eleven million people susceptible to illness and work-related injuries are not covered by a program intended to make access to health care more affordable and accessible to vulnerable populations. This is socially suicidal. Diseases know no borders and are not constrained by legal status—they spread by contagion to both legal and illegal residents through interaction in schools, places of employment, and public terrains where children and adults are likely to interact with one another. To exclude undocumented residents from health-care provision is tantamount to creating the potential for an epidemiological disaster. In other words, for Health Care Reform to succeed, immigration reform must succeed. Only by fixing the two systems simultaneously will we have the assurance that those living in the United States will have similar access to vital resources, including health care. Providing undocumented people with a path towards the regularization of their immigration status, would allow them to benefit from health-care reform. A society unable or unwilling to protect its weakest members puts itself at risk. The extension of services to the poor, the immigrant, the undocumented is more than a moral imperative; it is also a practical matter in the attempt to keep health care affordable and accessible to all who need it.

As we know, disparities in access to health care in the United States are unique in the advanced world. Whether with papers or without them, sooner or later, migrants confront the American medical apparatus, a very costly system geared to those able to pay for services, either directly or through third-party insurers. Health insurance is mostly linked to employment in relatively good jobs. Professional migrants are generally eligible for health insurance; refugees are covered under various federally-sponsored resettlement programs. On the other hand, manual labor migrants, even if legally in the country, tend to be uninsured or underinsured. Among the unauthorized, the proportion of uninsured persons is almost 100 percent.

By fits and starts, the federal and state governments have built a safety net for health-disadvantaged population, including the homeless and the unemployed. But this network is largely restricted to persons legally residing in the country. Unauthorized migrants and, since 1996, recent legal migrants are ineligible for Medicaid and other federally-sponsored programs. On a yearly basis, more than 1,200 community based clinics in every state and territory serve 20 million people, 40 percent of whom are children. The end result is to confine unauthorized and poor migrants to the bottom of the health hierarchy, confirming their caste-like status.

Our study, conducted between 2007 and 2009, yielded alarming and significant findings: Most undocumented immigrants and a large number of documented immigrants are uninsured. They are over-represented among those with lethal afflictions, including hypertension, diabetes, cardiac arrest, and obesity. Undocumented immigrants are least likely to seek medical care for a variety of reasons having to do with the demands of their work life and also because of cultural barriers, including language. Location matters—immigrants in South Florida and Central Jersey have greater access to health care than those in San Diego County.

The Health-Care Needs of Latinos in Trenton: A LALDEF Report

Latinos make up one-third of the population of Trenton today (up from 21% a decade ago) and close to 60% of Latinos are foreign-born. Close to one in four city residents are immigrants. The immigrant population of Trenton has grown by 63% since the year 2000. Latin Americans make up the vast majority (80%) followed by those of African origin (10%).

Indicators of the rate of immigrant incorporation are troubling. Less than one in four of the foreign-born are naturalized citizens. This leads us to estimate that there may be between 7,000 and 8,000 immigrants without legal status, or roughly one of every ten city residents.

The data collected in this sample is representative of the low-income, largely uninsured, primarily foreign-born Latino population of the South and East Wards of Trenton. Interviews were conducted during two health fairs held at St. Francis Medical Center in August and October, 2012, respectively, and of applicants for the Mercer County Area Community ID Card in Christ Episcopal Church.

Our main findings largely confirm much of what other surveys and needs assessments of similar populations, have already identified. Namely:

Latino immigrants are a significantly younger population than the general population. Our non randomized sample had an average age of 34, and roughly half were in the 25-35 age range vs. a fourth in the same age group for the overall city population.

BMI’s are significantly higher than the general population, and that of the national average for Hispanic adults, with over a third in the obese category (vs. a 23% overall rate of adult obesity in New Jersey).

Half of the respondents had at least one minor in their care. Only 10% of respondents had large families (3 or more children).

Half of the children were 5 and under, and two-thirds of the children are U.S. born citizens.

Children’s health insurance status aligns with their nativity; as a result 37% of the children are uninsured. As with the adults, this is a significant disparity (7 times higher than the overall rate of uninsured children in Mercer County).

All but 5% of the parents reported that their children’s health was good to excellent. As expected, there was a significant positive correlation between child’s health status and health insurance coverage.

The adults are largely uninsured (86% of respondents had no health insurance). This is a very large disparity from the general population at the state (17%), county (15%) or city level (23%).

Most respondents consider themselves in good health with 80% reporting their health to be good, very good or excellent. This is comparable to the rate in the general population.

Unsurprisingly, given the high uninsurance rate, 3 in 4 respondents have no regular primary care provider. Home remedies are the most common substitute for medical care.

Lack of health insurance is cited as the # 1 barrier to accessing health care. Language is also mentioned frequently.

The rate of utilization of health care services among this population is low across the board, including ER usage, and significantly so among men.

Recommendations

Overhaul Immigration and Health-Care Laws

Reform of the two systems rests on different principles. The emphasis of immigration reform should be on the economic importance of cross-border labor flows and the need to manage them on a predictable, fair, and legal way. By contrast, the emphasis of health care reform should be on the non-economic character of the services provided, removing them from the market and restoring them to their natural function as a public service, dispensed on a universalistic basis. Providing adequate services to vulnerable populations requires more than health care reform; it also demands an overhaul of immigration policy and new thinking about who deserves medical care. The goal is access to medical care for marginal or impoverished individuals and families, including immigrants, whether legal or not. Fear of deportation and the need to work can create delays that threaten lives and expand the cost of medical care.

Prioritize Primary Care

Primary care is key to the improvement of health and the reduction of costs but several barriers prevent vulnerable individuals from seeking care on a timely basis. Ultimately, the preservation of community health does not depend on individual choices alone—community matters too. Altruism and a vital market economy need not be at war. Better incentives to support primary care, outreach, and community engagement can extend health care services and keep costs down.

Eliminate Redundancies

Eliminating redundancies and facilitating communication among health care providers through the use of advanced technologies is part of the answer. Connecting primary and specialized care is a vital component. Federally Qualified clinics are key in the mission to extend services A major problem for the extension of health care services to underserved populations is the idea of health as a commodity rather than a human right. Federally Qualified Clinics may bridge the gap between market forces and altruism.

Provide Incentives for General Medical Service and Primary Care

The conflict between personal gain or profits and catering to the poor and underserved also affect the decisions of individuals aiming to become doctors. The ACA provides new stimuli for young professionals to specialize in primary care. That measure may bring about substantial benefits both for providers and recipients.

Focus on Cultural Barriers

A major barrier preventing the extension of health care to marginal populations, including immigrants, has to do with culture. Habitual practices, preconceptions, and fear can worsen health care conditions for many. Farm workers in Southern California face special challenges and risks. Language, the single most important tool to advance communication, can also be a problem. Cultural barriers create special difficulties in the case of sensitive conditions, like AIDS/HIV POSITIVE patients.Immigrants seeking work as day laborers can become the target of sexual predators and human traffickers. Attempts to help them must break down fear and prejudice. Not only in California but everywhere else, community organizations can bridge cultural gaps. This vision cannot work without stressing outreach and community support.

And extending health care services is not just about including immigrants, whether legal or unauthorized. Other vulnerable populations will benefit as well.

Ultimately, we, as a people must decide what kind of a society we want—one in which fear and prejudice will leave millions far from access to medical care, thus creating risks for everyone, or a society in which health is viewed as a human right benefitting all of US.

]]>https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/06/10/latinos-and-the-politics-of-health-care/feed/0174‘Latinos and the Politics of Immigrattion Reform’https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/05/15/latinos-and-the-politics-of-immigrattion-reform/
https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/05/15/latinos-and-the-politics-of-immigrattion-reform/#respondWed, 15 May 2013 16:41:13 +0000http://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/?p=170Continue reading →]]>As part of the Latino Stud­ies Reunions Event on May 31, 2013 Pro­fes­sor Douglas Massey (Sociology) will speak about Latinos in contemporary America. Massey details his topic below:

In 1970 the Latino population of the United States stood at around 9.6 million people. They comprised just 4.7% of the U.S. population and 71% were native born. In terms of national origins, 60% were Mexican, 15% were Puerto Rican, 7% were Cuban, and 6% were Central or South American, with 13% representing “other” origins. Over the next four decades, however, this small population was radically transformed by mass immigration to the point where in 2010 the number of Latinos stood at 50.5 million people, who constituted 16.3% of the U.S. population. Meanwhile, the share of native born Latinos had dropped to around 61% and the distribution of national origins had shifted, with Puerto Ricans and Cubans declining to just 9% and 3.5% of the total, respectively while Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans rose to comprise 63%, 7.9 and 5.5% of all Latinos.

At present, therefore, more than three quarters of all Latinos trace their origins to Mexico, Central America, or South America, compared with just 15.5% from the Caribbean. Moreover, whereas Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and Dominicans are overwhelmingly legal residents or citizens of the United States the bulk of Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans are non-citizens and a substantial share lacks documents entirely. The percentage foreign born among Mexicans is 36%, compared with 63% among Salvadorans, 69% of Guatemalans and Hondurans and two-thirds of Nicaraguans and Colombians. According to the latest estimates from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, 58% of Mexican immigrants are present illegally, compared with 57% of Salvadorans, 71% of Guatemalans, and 77% of Hondurans.

In other words undocumented migrants are no longer a small share of the Latino population. Among Mexican and Central Americans they constitute a majority of all those born abroad; and even when one considers national origins as a whole, the undocumented constitute 21% of all persons of Mexican origin, 38% of those of Salvadoran origin, 50% of those of Guatemalan origin, and 52% of those of Honduran origin. Never before have so many people been outside the law and never before have the undocumented been so concentrated in such a small number of national origins. As a result, working class Latinos are now the most vulnerable of all of America’s disadvantaged populations.

The rising tide of illegality within the Latino population is critical to understanding the nature of discrimination and exclusion in contemporary American society, for whereas Latinos may be a protected category U.S. under civil rights legislation, undocumented migrants are not. Indeed, U.S. immigration law encourages and often compels employers, landlords, and service providers to discriminate against the undocumented even as civil rights law requires them to remain neutral with respect to Hispanics. In recent years, the federal government has also stripped away legal protections from all non-citizens, not just the unauthorized but legal permanent residents as well. Legislation passed since 1996 has curtailed access to federally funded entitlements, stripped away rights to due process, and criminalized infractions that had formerly been civil violations, retroactively declared criminal convictions to constitute grounds from immediate deportation, and given the executive branch the right to declare anyone deportable on national security grounds without trial.

Meanwhile it has steadily expanded the immigrant enforcement apparatus not only at the border but internally. Since 1990 deportations from the United States have risen exponentially, rising from just 30,000 in that year to nearly 400,000 in 2010. Along the border, the number of Border Patrol Agents has risen from 3,700 to more than 20,000. The United States has built a massive bureaucracy to enact the 1930s deportation campaigns and the 1953 border militarization known as Operation Wetback on a permanent, ongoing basis.

Accompanying the rising share of undocumented migrants in the United States has been a sharp increase in the number of temporary legal workers admitted into the U.S. labor force. Entries to the United States by H-visa holders from Mexico alone rose from 17,000 in 1990 to 517,000 in 2010, a record number that exceeds the number of guest workers imported at the height of the Bracero Program in the late 1950s. Between the rising share of undocumented migrants and the increasing inflow of temporary workers, the number of people lacking labor rights in U.S. markets has increased dramatically, especially in new and old destination areas where Latin American immigrants have concentrated.

The rising share of exploitable workers lacking both civil liberties and economic rights, when combined with rising enforcement and steadily more onerous sanctions against undocumented workers, has caused a remarkable decline in the real value of the wages of Latino workers, especially among Mexicans. Accompanying the drop in wages has been a decline in incomes and a rise in poverty rates, to the point where Latinos have fallen from their historical position in the middle of the socioeconomic hierarchy between whites and blacks, to a new position at or below the position of African Americans. Accompanying this decline, other indicators of social well-being—notably health and education—have also fallen.

The remarkable rise in illegality among Latinos has implications that extend far beyond the undocumented themselves. In addition to the 1.5 million undocumented children living in families containing an unauthorized parent are four million U.S.-born citizen children, whose progress in society is held back by the very real fears and trepidations of their undocumented parents and siblings; and these numbers do not take into account the millions of other older children of undocumented migrants and more distant relatives. In 2008 the Pew Hispanic Center found that 72% of Latino immigrants said they worried about deportation some or a lot, as one might expect; but the figure was still quite high at 35% among native born Latinos, who were presumably not vulnerable to deportation themselves but worried about the deportation of friends or relatives. Indeed, 53% of native born Latinos said that the immigration debate had made life difficult for them.

Thus the illegality among Latinos that has been manufactured by U.S. policies over the past decades constitutes the single largest and most potent barrier to Hispanic socioeconomic mobility and integration in the United States. With huge fractions of Latinos lying outside the protections of the law and even larger shares related to people who lack legal protections, and with most rights stripped away from all non-citizen foreigners, the Hispanic population has never been more vulnerable and its position in America more precarious. Until the burden of illegality is lifted from the shoulders of Latinos in the United States, little other progress—economic, social, or political—will be possible.

]]>https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/05/15/latinos-and-the-politics-of-immigrattion-reform/feed/0170“The Latino Vote”https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/05/02/the-latino-vote/
https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/05/02/the-latino-vote/#respondThu, 02 May 2013 18:44:57 +0000http://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/?p=168Continue reading →]]>As part of the Latino Studies Reunions Event on May 31, 2013 Professor Ali Valenzuela (Politics) will speak about the “Latino vote” in the 2012 election and its significance for the growing political power of Hispanics. More details about Valenzuela’s topic follows:

During the 2012 election, scientific polling and polling aggregators such as Nate Silver at The New York Times, Simon Jackman at The Huffington Post, and our own Sam Wang at the Princeton Election Consortium entered the national consciousness like never before. Polling aggregators’ rise to prominence was due in part to the availability of massive amounts of state and national polling data, which the aggregators combined into sophisticated statistical models used to predict election outcomes in individual states as well as nationally. Several of the predictive models turned out to be highly accurate and immediately debunked claims of unfairly skewed polls favoring the Democrats that had been circulating in the weeks before Election Day. The polls did favor the Democrats, but that was because the Democrats were ahead in the presidential contest.

There are two important points in this conclusion. First, party identification – the level of support for the Democratic or Republican Party among the American public – changes from election-to-election, year-to-year and sometimes from poll-to-poll. Enthusiasm for the candidates, the state of the economy, and candidate positions on major policy issues like healthcare or U.S. military action abroad can all affect the proportion of Americans that identify as Democrats or as Republicans in a given poll. Just because a poll shows more Democrats or more Republicans than in the previous election does not mean that the poll is inaccurate. Second, scientific polling, and especially the combined average of many scientific polls, provides a very accurate snapshot of the level of support for a candidate in a national election. Scientific polling within states, and especially the average of many scientific polls within a state, provides a very accurate snapshot of state-levels of support for a candidate.

However, when it comes to polling Latino voters, many commercial firms do a poor job because of challenges and costs associated with interviewing voters in Spanish. For example, most polling firms employ a call back method in which, when they encounter a Spanish-speaker, they hang up and schedule a call-back with someone who can carry out the interview in Spanish. This has the effect of reducing response rates and the number of Spanish-only interviews that are successfully completed. Utilizing fully bilingual callers for Latino polling is expensive but necessary when upwards of 45% of the Latino electorate consistently prefers to interview in Spanish. This figure is among registered Latino voters who are all American citizens, to say nothing of the overall Latino population.

More critically, many polling firms, including the National Exit Poll, which interviews voters as they leave their voting places, do not interview in Spanish at all (more information). Exit Poll results are widely reported by the media, yet the effect of English-only interviewing is to bias results for Latinos towards those who are more acculturated: those who speak better English and live in wealthier parts of the country. Research consistently shows that more acculturated Latinos tend to hold more conservative policy attitudes and vote preferences more favorable to the Republican Party than among less acculturated Latinos. So polls that do not interview in Spanish, or that interview a lower-than-average proportion of Latinos who speak only Spanish, produce results that do not accurately reflect the Latino vote nationally or in states with a sizable Latino population.

The conservative bias of English-only Latino polling tends to produce results showing Republican candidates with more Latino support than in reality. In 2010, inaccurate Latino polling created a situation where Senator Harry Reid (D-NV) was predicted to lose his reelection bid for the U.S. Senate by a slight margin, but he instead won by 5.6 percentage points over his anti-immigrant challenger, Sharron Angle. Senator Reid won in large part because of the Latino vote, which supported his candidacy by a 90-8 margin, a huge gulf in Latino support between the two statewide candidates (more information). With Latinos representing about 12% of the Nevada electorate in 2010, their 82-point margin in favor of Reid translates into almost 10 additional percentage points for the Democratic win column, a figure greater than Reid’s margin of victory. Latino voters were pivotal to Harry Reid’s reelection and his return to the U.S. Senate as Majority Leader.

Fast-forward to 2012 and the crucial nature of the Latino vote repeated itself in at least four states: Colorado, Florida, Nevada and New Mexico. In these states, three of which were highly contested “swing” states (CO, FL and NV), Latinos’ level of support for President Obama was so much greater than their support for Governor Romney that they made the crucial difference in winning these states for the President. This outcome depended on two key factors: one, which I have already noted, is the large gap in Latino support between the Democratic and Republican candidates, an average difference of 54 percentage-points in these four states. Two, the Latino electorate in these four states—that part of the Latino population that was eligible and turned out to vote—was large enough to translate the gap in support between the two candidates into a substantial and pivotal vote contribution for a Democratic win. Without the Latino vote, and without such a wide margin of support for the Democrats among Latinos, it is unclear whether President Obama would have carried the day on November 6, 2012.

How did we get to such overwhelming Democratic support among the Latino electorate? As recently as 2004 approximately 40% of Latino voters supported George W. Bush, a vote margin with then-Senator Kerry of only 20 percentage points (more information). In my presentation, I will report more detailed Latino polling results from 2012 and discuss how we might understand such high levels of Democratic support among Latinos today.

On Friday, May 31, 2013 the Program in Latino Studies will host a Reunions Event for returning alumni from 3-4:30pm. This event, “¡Adelante! Latinos Reshaping America”, will feature Ali Valenzuela (Assistant Professor of Politics), Douglas Massey (Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology), and Patricia Fernández-Kelly (Senior Lecturer in Sociology). Marta Tienda (Director, LAO) will moderate, with opening remarks by Germán Lara (President of the Association of Latino Princeton Alumni). This event is co-sponsored by ALPA.

On December 13, 2012, Princeton hosted the conference “Diversity on Campus: Practices, Policies and Culture.” The purpose of the conference was to assemble leading scholars and academic administrators to exchange views about successful strategies for achieving diversity goals in higher education. Princeton President Shirley M. Tilghman and Provost Christopher Eisgruber each moderated panels. Among the questions considered were:

How can institutions maximize the educational benefits of diversity? How can institutions foster environments in which diverse populations–faculty, students, and staff–can flourish and how can institutional leadership facilitate these goals?

Professor Tienda participated in session 2; a panel discusion about creating a diverse campus. Videos of the panels can be seen here.

For a full description of the event, please visit the article in the Princeton Weekly Bulletin.

Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez has been the Librarian for Latin American, Iberian and Latino Studies at Princeton University Library since 2003. In addition to being responsible for the development of Princeton’s world class library collections from Latin America, Portugal and Spain, he oversees all collections and resources related to Latino Studies in Firestone Library. A fundamental part of that responsibility is to assist Princeton’s students and faculty in the discovery and use of its vast library resources. As such, Fernando welcomes all students in the Latino Studies Program to contact or meet with him in person in Firestone. He also invites all program affiliates to start exploring the Library’s vast resources through the online Latino Studies research guide that he created.

Fernando came to Princeton from The New York Public Library where he served as its Latin American Bibliographer starting in 1997. He earned both his M.L.I.S. and his M.S. in Politics at the University of Texas at Austin. In 2009-2010, he served as President of the Seminar on the Acquisition of Latin American Library Materials (SALALM), the international professional organization that groups librarians, book vendors, and other information professionals specializing in that part of the world. He was the editor of the Papers of the 55th Annual Meeting of SALALM, a volume published in 2012 titled The Future of Latin American Library Collections and Research: contributing and adapting to new trends in research libraries.

]]>https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2013/02/05/meet-the-librarian-for-latin-american-iberian-and-latino-studies/feed/01552012 Latino Heritage Month at Princeton University – By Silvana Alberti ’14https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2012/12/10/2012-latino-heritage-month-at-princeton-university-by-silvana-alberti-14/
https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/2012/12/10/2012-latino-heritage-month-at-princeton-university-by-silvana-alberti-14/#commentsMon, 10 Dec 2012 18:54:11 +0000https://blogs.princeton.edu/latinostudies/?p=142Continue reading →]]>Latino Heritage Month (LHM) originated in 1968 in the form of National Hispanic Heritage Week. In 1988, President Ronald Reagan expanded the weeklong celebration to its current monthly length, beginning on September 15th and ending in October 15th. The month has the intention of recognizing and celebrating the presence and heritage of Hispanic and Latino Americans in the United States, as well as their contributions to the society and culture of the U.S. In line with this mission, several Latino groups on campus have made it their goal to share this celebration with the whole of the student population of Princeton University.

This year, the events that Acción Latina and Chicano Caucus -the two Latino groups participating in this year’s Latino Heritage Month Committee- organized were designed to maximize impact on the general population of university students, particularly those not cognizant or frequently engaged with the cultures in question. The celebration started on October 4th with the Latino Heritage Month Kickoff Event, at Campus Club. Senior Grecia Rivas (’13) opened the evening by reminding us of the importance of our Latin American heritage, and was followed by Ms. Tennille Haynes, the Director of the Carl A. Fields Center, who gave an inspiring speech about multiculturalism. We closed the night by dancing to the rhythm of Latin American music.

For the first LHM week, we had a very engaging lunch discussion about the Latino and Latin American identity with Prof. Pedro Meira Monteiro (Oct 8th), and the student panel “Intersections of Race and Sexuality” (Oct 9th), an event where student leaders shared their personal experiences with this intersection, drawing distinctions and acknowledging similarities amongst different racial and ethnic groups. We also celebrated our Latino heritage at the Princeton University Art Museum; “Latinos at the Museum” (Oct 11th) included Mexican food and beverages, a special guest performance by Ballet Folklórico de Princeton, and a short themed tour of the Art of the Ancient Americas gallery. To close that week, we had a film screening of “Gun Hill Road”, followed by a talkback with Director Rashaad Ernesto Green (Oct 12th).

We started the following week’s celebrations with a Mexico vs El Salvador soccer match screening (Oct 16th), organized a “Latino Trivia Night!” (Oct 18th) in order to test our knowledge of Latino and Latin American geography, politics, music, arts and literature, and ended the week with an “Indoors Pickup Soccer” tournament at Dillon Gym (Oct 20th). Before fall break, we also encouraged everyone to go to the discussion organized “Latinos in the 2012 Elections: An Expert Discussion on Research and Politics.”

Finally, we closed the celebrations with a “LHM Variety Show” (Nov 9th), an event where performers from the Princeton Community gathered together to celebrate the Latino culture, dances and music; and a Closing Gala (Nov 10th), our final LHM event consisting of a Latin-American themed dinner catered by Taste of Mexico, followed by a dance party with the band Rumba con Son.